I’ve recently fulfilled a promise I made Alicia just before she died …. to visit Assisi in Italy, which we both fell in love with some years ago, so that she could accompany me in spirit.
A walk in the footsteps…
On a warm and sunny Friday morning I walked down the hill from Assisi itself to San Damiano, where St. Clare and her ‘Poor Ladies’, obeying church authority, lived out their lives in truly Franciscan poverty. It is a place redolent of that early spirit of joyful surrender of everything for love of the crucified Saviour. Visiting the tiny chapel where Francis first experienced his own call to poverty one cannot avoid a feeling that here, at least, the spirit of Assisi’s ‘il poverello’, little poor man, still exists.
Towards the end of his life when he was very ill Clare got permission to care for him for a while at San Damiano. She built him a small shelter made of branches in the garden and it was there that, almost blind and racked with pain he composed over a single sleepless night his wonderful ‘ Canticle of the Creatures’; surely the most inspiring and hopeful compositions in all medieval literature.
Later after he returned to the brothers living at Portziuncala, and Clare learned that he was dying she asked whether she might see him again? Francis sent one of the brothers, I think it was Raphael, to her with a message and 2 white doves.
The message was that she could not see him again, but she was not to be afraid.
“ Tell my little sister Clare that after my death she will see me again, and the sight will bring her great comfort. I also wish her to accept these 2 doves as a guarantee of my promise, and henceforward as long as the doves remain in her garden I too will remain with her at San Damiano.”
This story, really a legend, is recorded in the Fioretti de San Francesco, the ‘little flowers of Saint Francis’, but it is apparently a fact visible to anyone visiting San Damiano, and certainly visible to me, that ever since then, whatever the season… two white doves remain in Clare’s garden at San Damiano!
When I left I didn’t want to climb the steep path leading back to Assisi, ( it was the one part of our previous visit that Alicia hadn’t enjoyed,) but I saw a sign pointing along a path down the hillside and onto the flat plain below which said ‘ Sanctuary di Rivo Torto’
Rivo Torto is the place where Francis and those who followed him immediately after he surrendered his wealth lived. They occupied a shelter for farm animals for about 4 years. The shelter is still there inside the church built later over the spot; though now the ‘hovel’ as it is known has a slate roof rather than the roof of branches from the time when Francis and the early brothers lived there. I’d never been to Rivo Torto before so standing on the roadside outside of San Damiano I thought,
‘ Come on Alicia, we’ll walk to Rivo Torto. At least it isn’t uphill!’
It turned out to be a distance of about 4 kilometres which it took me about an hour to walk. My legs were really aching by the time I got there, but after I’d stayed for about half an hour I came out of the church and realised I was facing a fork in the road. One road, the one I had just walked along, went back to San Damiano. I asked a lady in the car park where the other one went to.
“Portziuncala,” she replied. “ In Santa Maria de Angeli!”
Portziuncala of course is the little chapel once owned by the Benedictines which Francis repaired as he did San Damiano, and where the early members of the order moved to when Rivo Torto became too small to accommodate all of them.
‘ Alicia,’ I thought, ‘ We just have to walk to Portziuncala along this road.’
There is another story in the Fioretti which tells how Clare and Francis were walking along the road one day when they came to a fork in the road ahead. ( Was it at Rivo Torto? I wonder.)
The ground was covered with snow but Clare knelt down and said,
“ Francesco, it is for you to decide which way we two must go.”
Francis prayed for a moment and then replied,
“ Little sister, our Heavenly Father wishes you to take the road to your sisters at San Damiano, while He wishes me to take the road to my brothers at Portziuncala!”
Clare rose sadly from the ground and, as they turned to part she asked,
“But when will you and I meet again?”
“ When roses are in bloom,” Francis replied, “ We two will meet again.”
He had only gone a short distance along the road to Portziuncala when he heard Clare’s voice calling to him again,
“ Francesco!….Francesco!!”
He turned and looked towards her and saw that where she had knelt on the cold ground… fresh roses were in bloom!
It took me about another hour to walk from Rivo Torto to Portziuncala because I took a wrong turning and ended up beside a typical Italian farmhouse where an elderly lady who couldn’t speak a word of English took endless trouble trying to explain to me where I had gone wrong, but eventually I got there
The tiny chapel of Portziuncala is now housed under the dome of the massive basilica of Santa Maria de Angeli, and a few feet behind it is the tiny stone shelter called the ‘ Chapel of the Transitus’ which covers the spot on the ground where Francis actually died. He had asked the brothers to lay him naked onto the bare earth because, ‘ I came into this world with nothing and I desire to leave it with nothing.’
I said a few prayers at each chapel and then turned away to leave the basilica. Beside me were a group of English pilgrims, and one of the ladies in the group beckoned over one of the friars who were around the building making sure that everything was running smoothly. She asked him,
“Where can we see the roses?”
“Ah…. You want to see the garden with the roses? Come with me.”
He led them off to a side doorway and pointed down a passageway beyond.
“Down there… you will see the roses.”
I thought ‘ Alicia, we must follow this.’
We went down into the passageway along one side of which were large glass windows overlooking the small garden at Portziuncala. There’s a grey stone statue in the middle, life size, of Francis stroking the wolf of Gubbio, but the rest of the garden is filled with rose trees, and apparently no matter what season of the year you visit, whether it be summer, spring, autumn, or winter…. roses are always in bloom in the garden at Portziuncala!
